In any area of history, has any civilization ever recognized and/or practiced gay marriage? I know there was a lot of gay sex during the Roman Empire, but did they ever officially get married? Has anybody?
Short answer: we don’t know.
Slightly longer answer: Gay historian [urk=John Boswell - Wikipedia]John Boswell wrote a book on the topic, entitled Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe in which he claimed that certain rites of the early Christian church solemnized same-sex unions. Critics claimed that the rites in question referred to the creating of platonic “brother” relationships. It’s been a while since I read the book but I recall finding Boswell’s argument rather compelling at the time.
Outside Europe there’s sporadic evidence of people of the same physical sex marrying, but IIRC most such instances are along the lines of the Native American Two-Spirits who were seen as fully embodying both male and female spirits and thus not purely a marriage of people of the same sex.
In Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe, scholar John Boswell cites a number of ceremonies in pre-Medieval Christendom that apparently aim to create a loving same-sex pair. Many doubt his findings, but he backs them up with an impressive array of citations.
A number of other cultures practise ceremonies in which a man takes a younger man as his bride, with observances similar to a man and woman marrying (e.g. bride price, rituals, etc.) I believe I’ve seen references to females assigned male gender roles by their culture taking wives as well. Hamish has a very interesting book on African homosexualities that would be worth consulting in this regard.
Let’s try that link again: John Boswell
Of course. Some cultures even practice same-sex marriage amoung straights who need a creative way to avoid losing property and/or children.
Cite?
You mean other than those places that recognise it now?
I remember reading about older men ‘inducting’ younger men into sex in ancient Greece, but later on the younger man would marry a woman and have a family, so I’m not sure that that’s the same thing at all. I do not get the impression that the ancient Greeks thought of sexual preferences as dividing people into two (or more) types.
Disclaimer: all this comes from my memories of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, so it may be a little simplified, or even inaccurate.
I can’t find an online cite, but any good anthropology book on the Nandi, a Pastorialist tribe in East Africa will explain this practice in detail. We just had a test on different forms of marriage in my Anthropology class and I remembered this tribe because I found the female/female marriage practiced therein very interesting. Female-female marriages is around 3% and results because only sons may inherit property. If there is no male heir, then the co-wives or the husband’s brother get the property. How Nandi women get around this is by marrying by allowing the heirless woman to marry a younger woman with male sons. This female husband is not allowed to have sex with men anymore and her wife is required to attend to her just as she would a man. The female husbands are not required to act like men outside the home but they can chose to do so if they wish.
I’ll dig around my books and see if I still have my copy of Murray’s book on same sex marriages.
Oh, and if the female husband’s wife gets pregnant, the child belongs to the female husband, no matter who is the biological father.
There’s a little bit of info on wikipedia. I don’t see it mentioned there, but supposedly in Germany before the Nazi party took over, gay rights started making gains and there were some unofficial ‘marriages’.
It might be worth noting that, regardless of legal or cultural acceptance, one definition of marriage (the “common law” one) is a contract between two people to live together as spouses. By this usage, a lot of gay marriages have existed over the years, but generally in closeted fashion. Some famous examples:
[ul][li]Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon[/li][li]Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, whose estates endowed the Britten Pears Foundation and Library[/li][li]Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman[/li][li]Dr Matrix and Cajun Man (well, famous among Dopers! ;))[/ul][/li]
Certainly any committed romantic relationship conducted as a marriage and going on for decades ought to qualify de facto as marriage, despite what we might say de jure.
The Roman Emperor Nero married 4 times. Twice to women and twice to men. In one case he served as the “groom” while the other man served as “bride” and the other time Nero served as “bride” and his lover as “groom”.
Not entirely correct. In The Symposium, Plato has a bunch of famous Athenians sitting around at a dinner party debating the nature of love. When it’s his turn to speak, Aristophanes (author of The Frogs, The Clouds, Lysistrata, etc) weaves an absurd little fable explaining that “once upon a time” all humans had four legs, four arms, two heads – that they were, essentially, two people joined together. One fine day, for whatever reason, the gods got peeved at humanity and rent us all asunder, and each duplified, bicephalous being became, well, your more recognizable featherless biped with broad, flat nails. Love, therefore, is the lifelong quest to rejoin with one’s other half. Aristophanes further explains that some of the “precatastrophe” beings consisted of a male half and a female half, while others were entirely male or entirely female. So one’s sexual preference was determined by the gender of one’s missing half.
This odd little myth therefore divides people firmly into two classifications: homosexual and heterosexual. It doesn’t seem to take bisexuality into account.
Now seeing as how it’s been more than ten years since I last perused the pages of my Complete Works of Plato, I might very well have gotten some of the finer points confused. I trust that our more capable classicists will amend any deficiencies in my outline.
That’s right.
We’ve been practicing gay marriage for almost 27 years. I think we almost have it right.
(Sorry . . . I couldn’t help myself.)
**
Interesting information here, matt_mcl and Kimera, especially. Neat stuff.
So that’s what they were talking about in that song in Hedwig and the Angry Inch!
WTF???
Nero had a lot of weddings, but I doubt he was every formally married to another man. There was no place for that in Roman legal structure.
Kizarvexius, while your recounting of Plato is correct, it’s hard to figure out when to take Plato seriously. While that may be one opposing point, the majority of the evidence we have is that the Greeks saw no contradiction in having a male lover while having a wife at home.
But are any of the given examples really “gay marriage”? Are they performed between two people of the same sex who are phsyically attracted only to members of their own sex? If we institute a system to allow two women to marry so that property can be transfered in a certain way, but the women do not engage in a sexual relationship, is that really “gay marriage”? Or, if a “two-souls” person (winkte) is accepted as a “wife” in a polygamous marriage in the Lakota tribe, is that “gay marraige”? Seems to me you’d have to expmales of two “two-souled” people entering into a marriage for that to be considered “gay marriage”.
Hmmm…without being too snitty, John, you’re raising too high a bar here – in your generalization, not in your specific examples – and narrowing the definition too closely. Why must the two persons uniting be Kinsey-6 exclusive gay in orientation for it to be accepted as a gay marriage? Certainly if a marriage-like union focusing on control and transfer of property is standard without suggesting sexual relations in some culture, that doesn’t make it a gay marriage, any more than a childless bachelor adopting his nephew or his longtime assistant as a son for inheritance purposes necessarily implies a sexual relationship. Likewise, the berdache/winkte role is not on all fours with any contemporary Western-culture recognized relationship.
But consider the following: Ted Haggard rather notoriously was not an exclusive heterosexual – does that negate his union with his wife as being in intent and public practice a heterosexual marriage? Since former member Esprix was upfront about his attractions and I don’t happen to know the specifics for any active gay members, let me point out that, while primarily attracted to other men, and in particular to younger men of East Asian heritage, Esprix admitted to feeling desire for Jeri Ryan and Sophia Loren at various times. If he committed to a marital relationship with another man, would that be ruled out as a “gay marriage” in your view by his marginal bisexuality – not quite exclusively homosexual in attractions?
If I had to hang a definition on it, I’d say a gay marriage is a union contracted between two people of the same sex who feel romantic/sexual feelings for each other along with the other components of a healthy marital relationship and who wish to make the formal marital commitment to each other. Whether either or both is otherwise attracted, to men, women, boys*, girls*, sheep*, or Rick Santorum’s dog*, is immaterial to the commitmen they’re making to each other.
- No, dammit, I am not equating being gay to pedophilia or bestiality; I’m using those terms in describing the sort of breadth of possible other attractions that would not be relevant.